Moderately high winds and light rain did strike the capital later at night, but it hardly lived up to the hype generated in sections of social and mainstream media. Delhi’s disaster management (DDMA) helpline, 1077, kept buzzing through Tuesday morning, not with calls reporting any disaster but people asking when to expect the promised storm.
“I have to leave my house in the next one hour. Is the storm finally coming or is it now safe to travel?” asked a caller. “We don’t know for sure. It is advisable to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary,” replied an operator. “There have been no reports of any damage anywhere but the phones have been constantly ringing. Most callers want to know the exact time when the storm would start,” said a DDMA official.
The helpline official said his operators had a tough time answering queries. “We are not the Met department, how would we know exactly when the storm would strike? Most callers wanted a reassurance that the storm would not come but we can’t give a surety,” he said.
Attendance was thin at most schools in the capital. “Since Delhi schools were open in the morning shift, we got a lot of calls in the morning from worried parents asking why we haven’t closed schools. Trying to make them understand that we don’t have the authority to close schools was futile and we had to tell them not to send their child to school if they felt so,” the officer said.
The helpline was also getting calls neighbouring Gurugram and Noida. “We were advising such people to call the disaster management authorities of their respective state,” he said.
The barrage of information in the media about an impending storm, along with schools getting closed in parts of NCR and a late Monday night squall, had sent anxiety levels soaring in Delhi and neighbouring cities.
The chain reaction of panic began on Sunday with the Haryana government shutting down all schools for two days, anticipating a big storm. All kinds of advisories followed, including one from an RWA in Gurugram that urged residents to stock up a month’s dose of medicines.
Ghaziabad closed all schools and colleges on Tuesday, as did half a dozen schools in Noida. And late on Monday, just as the winds started picking up, power was switched off in all of Gurugram with all 900 electricity feeders in the city being shut down for an hour between 11.30pm and 12.30am.
The storm that hit Gurugram blew at a modest 50kmph and, other than kicking up clouds of dust, passed by in a couple of hours much more calmly than anticipated. In Delhi, the winds were slightly stronger at 64kmph. “Prepare an emergency kit with essential items for safety and survival”, said the first line of Delhi government’s thunderstorm advisory issued on Monday.
The long list of do’s and don’ts also contain such reassuring advice as “crouch down with feet together and head down to make yourself a smaller target” — this was what you were suggested to do after finding a robust shelter that didn’t have a metal sheet for a roof.
The disproportionate anxiety might have been provoked by the May 2 storms that had led to 112 deaths in Rajasthan and UP, but it also showed a communication gap between the weather department and the government. The weather department, for instance, had never predicted a very strong storm in NCR — it had forecast winds speeds of up to 70kmph that eventually “mellowed down” to 50.